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FIRE AND WATER, EARTH AND AIR

“As human beings we cannot truly say that we are separate. We cannot sever ourselves. We are united with our surroundings–we belong to our environment.” – Rudolf Steiner, Agriculture Course, 49

Daybreak. Cool sunlight falls through the trees. My hands are black with soot, black in their cracks and creases. I work with earth.

I rise, walk up the mountain, noting the shooting star in seed and feathery yarrow in leaf. I walk on, bending beneath branches of overhanging pine and side-stepping the poison oak beneath my feet. I come at last to a rushing creek. As with every morning, I bare myself, and then I plunge in.

Cold water and evening fires. This is the life of the mountains.

I begin each day with water, and I end each night with fire. I split wood, then watch it crackle, consumed by flames. This is my meditation: to watch as the fire eats itself, and to watch as it lives on.

Living here, by the side of rushing creek, I move in my rhythms with the elements. For the first time in my life, I am subject to the rules of wood and water, hearth and flame. Moonlight wakens me at night–that, and the cold.

Here in this wood house, I am one with the elements of life. I am the fire that lights up the hearth. I am the water that flows, never ending, down mountain’s slope. I am the life force pushing up earth, emerging, every day, as the world of lush green life.

Builders of the Dawn

Builders of the Dawn is a radio series focusing on sustainability, right livelihood, and the emerging cooperative culture. It spotlights a region, the Klamath-Siskiyou range in southern Oregon and northern California, to showcase individuals who are making changes in their lives to make bigger changes in the world. These people, farmers, educators, permaculture teachers, ecologists, musicians, and activists are working to reconnect themselves to each other, to the wider web of life, and to the Earth. They are actively living a new story, building a culture of cooperation. Builders of the Dawn is produced by Ariel Blackbird for KAOS 89.3 FM Olympia.